"'-~l
%.
:-;.:~
Chapter 25
~QD~\~u\ -""' ~ ~---J~(!tt\ L~ ~ ~~
\
eJ. . \)~ \\-,}vv--Drt- .
n .11 1 ,,00.., o tn- 6l
llo Jnu\f u ·
L.
Stuart Hall
,
1
RECONSTRUCTION WORI<: IMAGES OF
POSTWAR BLACI< SETTLEMENT Cl984J
(Source: Hall, Stuart (1984) 'Reconstruction Work: Images of Post War Black Settlement', Ten-8,
16: 2-9)
Editor's introduction
Stuart Hall has been active in cultural studies from its start (he was the second director of
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham from 1969
to 1979) and is perhaps now the most inftuential spokesperson for the discipline. He has
increasingly focused his work on issues of cultural identity and difference, specifically
addressing questions of ethnicity, 'race' and racism. His work on ethnicity and identity has
always combined everyday materials (personal reminiscences, empirical observations
about the everyday lives of black British youth, 'domestic' photography and such like) with
historical, political and theoretical investigations.
A central issue faced in this chapter is how to recover and rescue the experiences of
postwar black British immigrants from accounts that would represent them as either a
problem {for 'British culture') or simply as victims of racism. For Hall what needs recovering is the agency and liminality <the in-between-ness) in the transition from one culture to
another, where colonial relations and class-based propriety saturate both cultures. In reading the traces of experience in these journalistic and High Street photographs, Hall shows
how larger social meanings can be found in the details of everyday !ife. Clothes, gestures,
posture a!l have a story to tell, and the story is one of attitudes, aspirations and apprehensions. For Hall these photographs are part of an archive of a, history of migration and they
need to be attended to with knowledge of their pictorial conventions and the social uses
that they were put to. Interestingly it is the ability of photography to fabricate (and tabulate) an image which might most productively bear the traces of everyday life. The conventions of High Street photography (the limited range of props and backdrops) make
everyday life vivid precisely through its exclusion (unlike the non-professional family
album, here we know everyday life is elsewhere). Yet in fabricating images that register
252
STUART HALL
personal and social desires they articulate an aspect of everyday life that for the most part
remains hidden.
Further reading: Hal! 1993, 1995, 1996; Hirsch 1997; Kuhn 1995; G. Turner 1992.
HE HISTORY OF BLACK SETTLE1"lENT IN BRITAIN in the post~\var
years is only just beginning to be written. One of the essential preconditions of
such an account is the collection, preservation and interpretation of 'documents',
public and private, formal and informal, as \veil as the oral testimonies of those who
actually went through the experience in the early days. The past cannot speak, except
through its 'archive'.
VVhen such histories do come to be written, the photographic CYidcnce is likely to
play an extremely important role in their construction. One hopes that by then the
historians will have gained some experience in 'hO\v to read' it. This contribution
examines some of the difficulties inherent in reconstructing those histories from
existing photographic texts, which are themselves extremely diverse.
There is no such unitary thing as 'photography'. Photography is a convenient way
of referencing the diversity of practices, institutions and historical conjunctures in
which the photographic text is produced, circulated and deployed. Many of the photographs relevant to the history of post-\var migration will already ha,·e made a public
appearance in the field of representation (in the press, magazines, etc.) - and arc
therefore already inscribed or 'placed' by that earlier positioning. Their meanings wHI
already ha\'c been inflected by the discourses of photographic studio, high-street shop,
news-photo agency, book publishing, newspaper or magazine, colour supplement or
gallery. The vast majority will already have been organised within certain systems of
classification which tran:dCr to them the supplementary imprint of their own generic
meanings, etc.: family portrait, news shot, agency scrapbook, photo cxposC, etc. Each
practice, each placing, each di.scoursc thus .slides another layer of meaning across tht:frame .
It is diHlcult, if not hy now impossible, to recaptun.: the earlier meanings of these
photographs. In any event, the search for their 'essential Truth'- an original, founding
moment of meaning- is an illusion. The photo(;raphs an: essentially mu!tiaccentua! in
mcanina.
No such "'Jlreviouslv~ natural momcn~ of true mcanincr,
~untouched bv~ the
b
b
codes and social relations of production and reading, and transcending historical time,
exists.
The exercise in interpretation thus calls for comiderable caution, historical
judgement - in essence, a politics of reading. The evidence which the photographic
text may he assumed to represent is already overendO\vcd, overdetermined by other,
further, often contradictory meanings, which arise within the intcrtextuality of all
photographic representation as a social practice. It is unclear which constitutes the
greater danger: the confusions caused hy the relays of meanings in wbich the photographs arc already ovcrinscribed; or the riot of dcconstructions to which they arc
certain to be exposed, not least from some of the new orthodoxies of the 'cultural
left', caught as they sometimes are in the spirals of the post-Marxist, poststructuralist, post-modernist deluge. Black historians, especially, handling these
T
IMAGES OF POSTWAR BLACK SETTLEMENT El984l
253
explosi\·e little 'documents', will have to steer their way through the increasingly
narrow passage which separates the old Scylla of 'documentary realism as Truth' from
the new Charybdis of a too-simplistic 'avant-gardism'.
Take, for example, the news agency photographs of the arrival of black people
from the Caribbean on the boat-trains (Figure 25.1 ). These shots were taken at the big
London rail-stations, \vhcre the steamers spewed out their human cargo at the end of
their long journeys - Kingston via Southampton, Avonmouth-Bristol and Liverpool
docks; then by steam-train through the English rural and urban-industrial heartland, to
Paddington, Victoria and VVaterloo. Here are the crowded stations; people sitting on
their luggage or standing about, hands clasped, waiting: waiting to be met, or to
recognise a friend or an unexpected relative or even just for an acknowledgement
from a friendly face amongst the cro\vds with their bulging suitcases and straw baskets.
Men, women and children, already battened down against the freezing \\'Cather by the
ubiquitous wearing of hats. People 'dressed up to the nines', formally, for 'travelling'
and even more for 'arrival'. Wearing that expectant look - facing the camera, open
and out\vard, into something they cannot yet see ... the ne\\· ltfe.
These people are in the liminal- the in-between- state: in suspended animation.
This, for better or worse - their faces seem to say - is the dead end of one thing and
the uncertain beginning of another. It is a scene of transition which occurred any day
of the week in the immigration 'high season' throughout the 1950s and early 1960s,
until the barriers closed. Trickling out from these focal points into the grey light of
!'addington, Netting Hill, Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side ... A graphic record.
But what do these pictures mean? Can they fix and prescribe their own reading,
decipherment? VVhat do we make of these images now?
Figure 25.1 Victoria Station, London, 1956, Hulton~Deutsch Collection
.'AAGES OF' ·sTWAR BLACK SETTLEMENT [1984]
254
255
STUART HALL
For one thing, they contradict our expectations. \rVhy arc the men and women so
formally got up? \Vhy docs everybody >Vcar a hat? Why arc they carrying their clothes
in straw baskets? VVhy do they look so respectable? VVhcrc arc the street fighters, the
rude boys, the Rastas, the reggae? How are \VC to read what these photographs most
powerfully construct: a certain form of innocence?
Innocence is a dangerous, ambiguous, ambivalent construction for black people.
\Vhite discourses so often rcprc::;cnt us as simpletons, simplc~mindcd primitives,
smiling country people, not quite keeping up in the fast lanes of the advanced world. It
i~ a reading to be refused. These arc not country bumpkins, or indigent cousins 'from
the Tropics', or primitives just swinging down from the coconut trees, or anybody's
Smile Oranoe folks. These people have just survived the longest, hardest journey in their
lives: the journey to another identity. They are people 'in transition' to a new state of
mind and body: migranthood. They are probably from a city, like Kingston, as big and
swinging in its poverty and style as any small colonial capital. They have torn themselves up by their roots, sa\·cd up what for them (considering the annual average wage)
is a colossal sum, paid it over to a steamship company tra\·elling incognito under some
assumed Panamanian flag. Half the family is left behind and nobody knows \Vhen or
whether they will ever be united again. These men and women have just burnt their
boats in the determination to carve out a better life.
All this may be 'beyond the frame'; but it registers inside the frame- precisely as
a kind of 'innocence'. This is another way of referring to that moment of 'waiting' just
before you step o~T the end of the earth into ... into Britain, tht• ingrained, embattled
nature of whose racism you do not yet know (that is, of which you arc still, in a
way, 'innocent') because it hasn't yet hit you hard bet\vcen the eyes ... A lirninal
movement, caught between two worlds, hesitating on the brink.
'vVe can find this trace of innocence too, if you know where to look, elsewhere
inside the frame. The people arc 'dressed up' because they arc on the longest one-way
journey of their lives, literally and figuratively. Jamaicans travelled as they went to
church, or visited their relative!'>- in their 'Sunday best'; the best thing you had in
your wardrobe, fOr special occasiom. The suits and dresses arc the clothes of someone
who is determined to make a mark, make a f,wourah!e impression. The formality is a
signifier for self-respect. Thest· arc not the victims of migration, like the Jews and East
European::; photographed by Thomas Hine arriving at Ellis Island in New York. These
fo!b are in good spirits. They mean to sunh-c. The angle of the hats is uni\-crsally
jaunty, cocky. Already, there is scy-lc. 'Face the music, darling, and let's make a mo\·c.'
There is a similar problem of interpretation about the vast, uncatalogucd collection of formal 'high-street' photo-portraits which arc certain to be brought to light by
a svstematic search, crumbling awav in files or shO\·cd under the beds in boxes. For
ex~mplc, the young woman with th~ glo\·es and handbag, holding up or being held up
by the basket of artificial flowers (Figure 25.2). (There is a wonderful re-presentation
of the same idea in the self-portrait by the black painter Sonia Bryce, of herself,
surmounted by her parents and sisters, entitled She Ain't Holdin9 Them Up, She's Holding
On (Some English Rose).) The well-dressed young man held together-by the clip-on
fountain pen is talking on a phone which is not connected to anything, but sits
incongruously on top of a mock-Greek column, straight from the disused basement of
the British Museum (Figure 25.3). Or: nurse, in formal head-dress- smiling? Not
smiling? Would anyone dream of posing for a picture like that now?
Figure 25.2 Studio portrait, Birmingham, 1961
Yet despite these ambiguities and disaYowals of meaning, these high-street portraits abo contain a sort of alternative history of black people in Britain- alternative
to the documentary or the 'social problem' traditions, their codes and meanings,
which now construct the dominant reading of that history (and to ..,vhich -..ve ""·ill come
in a moment). Every photograph is a structure of 'presences' (what is represented, in a
256
·;;
STUART HALL
~
-~lllj:g;;? !ol~­
:;> -~
:gl:;~
-, /
·~::~{~lf~
__
·~
L JAY~
·~W
•
Figure 25.3 Studio portrait, Birmingham) 1961
...
~
,,
IMAGES OF POSTWAR BLACK SETTLEMENT [1984)
257
definite way) and 'absences' ("vhat is unsaid, or unsayablc, against which what is there
'represents'). 'We \viii have to struggle to bring out what these formal portraits, so
powerfully inscribed by the practices of the high-street photographer, so much under
subjection to the codes of late-Edwardian portraiture, han-: to 'say' -as well as their
silences.
signify a certain democratisation of representation. They are poor-person's
'portraits'. The camera did, for the poor, what painting could not do. The formality
and sense of occasion of these photographs arc inscribed in the \vays in which the
figures arc formally posed, frozen, in the way they have been suspended in formal
space and time. They are certainly not 'at home'. They are not at work either. In fact,
they arc not represented as being in any human or social enYironment. They exist only
in and for studio time, studio space. They arc the bearers of the professional, smalltime photographer's aspiration to 'art'. They have been transferred directly under his
rules of construction. They exist for him. (I use the male pronoun advisedly, since
overwhelmingly- but not exclusively- these professional photographers were, until
recently, men.) You can sec what has been 'constructed out' by the very positive
functions of the composition only by contrast \Vith, say, the same figures, but this time
'caught' in time, in place- for example, a photo of a roadsweeper at work.
And yet, before \Ve think \Ve haYe a complete grasp of these archaic representations, it is worth recalling that these formal portraits vvere also, in their O\Vn time,
'documentary'. They documented \vhere people were at a certain stage of life, and
how they imagined themselves, hm"· they became 'persons' to thcmseh-cs and to
others, through the ways in which they were represented. The photos were what you
sent home as 'c,·idence' that you had arrived safely, landed on your feet, vvere getting
some\vhere, surviving, doing all right. It would therefore be wrong to read these
portraits as exclusively the result of the imposition of the codes of formal (\1r·hite)
portrait photography on an alien (black) subject, for that simplification would be
precisely to collude, however unconsciously, \Vith the construction of ·west Indians as
objects, always 'outside time', outside history. The photographed subjects also had a
real invc:)tment in these representations. In fact, Edwardian portraiture and the formal
photograph - icons in the domestic gallery of memories - were as common in my
childhood in poor but respectable homes in Kingston as they were in Kingston upon
Thames. The round centre-table in my grandmother's fi\·ing-room in a tiny country
village in Old Harbour in rural Jamaica was crammed with them; one formal pose (my
grandfather, resplendent in his gold watch-chain and three-piece suit) jostling for a
place behind another (my \Vistful fading great-grandmother, grey hair in a bun, with a
Victorian tortoiseshell comb resolutely stuck through it).
Our family history was constructed through these representations. The codes of
respectability and of respect were every bit as powerful, and as complex, amongst
black people in post-Victorian colonial Jamaica as they were in post-Victorian colonising Britain. Slavery, colonisation and colonialism locked us all - them (you) and us
(them) - into a common but unequal, uneven, history, into the same symbolic
and representational frames. Afro-Caribbean culture is precisely the result of the
contradictory ways these symbolic histories \verc irrevocably bound together.
Those who doubt the complexities of positioning which this history of uneven development contains should read C.L.R. James, the Eng!ish~speaking Caribbean's most
outstanding Marxist historian and intellectual, on the subject of cricket in Beyond a
258
STUART HALL
Boundary- and think again. Jamaicans may h<wc been placed in the subordinate position by the codes of the formal family portrait, but they were never outside those
codes.
This is one aspect of the histor_y of black migration that is going to be all too
tempting to forget or disa\'OW, since it docs not fit easily with current expectations, It
docs not fit \dth either 'Jamaica', the Black Nation, or 'Jamaica', the sign of the
Tropical-Exotic. That is why [am pleased this informal evidence exists. Its ambiguities
rcsisc simplification and disrupt our reading. That is also why I admire the corrective
provided by Val VVilmcr's photographs of 'e\·cryday Jamaican life' in Britain in the
1960s - and why I refuse to be absolutist either about the fact that she is a white
photographer photographing blacks or about the so-called 'documentary-realist trad~
ition' in which her images are often constructed. I find an astonishing plenitude in the
constructed complexities of some of tho::;e photographs: the pastor and his "vifc at his
front gate; the church-going family- everyone (again) in a hat, including the babe in
arms. These images arc part of the frequently unrecorded, unrecognised, unspoken
history of everyday life and practice in the black communities in Britain. The cultural
historian \\·ho sets out to interpret this record without an understanding of the
complex position which religion has played in the life of the black communities in
the Black Diaspora will undoubtedly see something, but will not have learnt to read
the cultural signposts and multiaccented traces which history has left behind- traces,
as Gramsci says, 'without an inYentory'.
And yet, of course - to repeat an earlier point - \\·hat 'signil1es' is not the
photographic text in isolation but the text, caught in the network of the chains of
signification which overprint it, its inscription into the currency of other discourses,
its intcrtextuality. The photogra1)h of boat-loads of VVest Indians at the Customs
actually appeared, already in place with others, in a Picture Posr artide of 1956. It \Vas
part of a very distinctive way of constructing its subject: hbck migrants as a problem:
'Thirty Thousand Colour Problems'. Three thousand, the article tells us, is the rate of
arrivals per month. Thirty thousand arc expected in 1956. And e,·cry last one of them
'a problem'. The written text anchors- as the preferred, the Jominant, meaning -one
of the many potential meanings which the rnul tircfcrentiality of the photographic texts
supports. This is how a problem is produced \Yithin representation. Black people comt:
in such large numbers. Surprisirw!y, thcv all want to work and to !in: in homes. The\·
don't und~·~tand how to drt:ss fc~ the ur~ccrtaintics of the English climate. Tht_y don;'t
ha,·e an accurate picture of lifC 'over here'. The problem they pose for 'us' is uni,·ersal,
ubicjuitous. It is OYcrdetermined from every conceh·ablc direction. It is outside the
norm, beyond the pale. It is- they an.~- the Other.
I have written dscwhere about the particular strengths and ,,·eakncsscs of Picture
Pose's social documentarv stde of 'realism'. In many wavs, the critic1ue of social
documentary is strength~ned and reinforced by the~ disc~un;es of social exposure
which arc in play in this example. Picwre Pose turned an obsen-ant, socially enquiring
eye on many corners of English life and society, before and after the \Var, which ·were
excluded or invisible to the media of social communication. It became part of a
significant ideological formation - what I once called the 'eye' or 'gaze' of social
democracy.
This way of looking at England was capable of representing hitherto invisible
social issues; but, characteristically, it always constructed them as social problems. It
h)t
Hi
IMAGES OF "OSTWAR BLACK SETTLEMENT [1984]
259
represented the subjects of its 'look' as the intensely interesting, intensely human,
intensely ordinary, objects of forces they could not control or comprehend. It summoned up a concern which made powerful claims on our humanism; but it could not
penetrate more deeply because it had no language for social contradiction, no way of
breaking the surfaces of 'naturalism' in which the problem presented itself, or of
'speaking' the oppositional forces out of which radical social transformation might be
generated. I haYe argued that both the strengths and the limitations of this particular
',vay of seeing' were bound up with its actual codes and practices of representation:
the observing eye, the external, objccth·e character of reality, the documenter in a
position of knowledge, the confinement of meaning to the rich surface of things: its
particular variant of what I have called (for I believe it to be articulated as a political
formation as well as an ideological and discursive field) 'social democratic realism'.
This 'look', inscribed through a particular set of codes and discourses, is all too
plainly to be seen again in some of the 'best' documentary photojournalism about 'the
problem of blacks' in the early decades of migration. How much this is the product of
the practices of representation, how little the outcome of 'natural', inedtablc, or in
any simple way 'true' ways of seeing and believing is shown, I think, by an intriguing
paradox. In the issue of Picture Post for 30 October 1954, 'the problem' is constructed
as the black presence. However, in the news~ photo of the first major race riots Netting Hill, 1958 -which shows young people charging through the streets of North
Kensington in ways which might be thought to be part of 'the problem', there is not a
black face to be seen. Absences sometimes speak louder than words.
Ho\vever, it must also be said that the current critical orthodoxv has somc\\·hat
about documentary realism bv; assimilati~g
all 'realisms'
trivialised the argument
'..__
(which one ought to he at pains to discriminate and differentiate) into one great,
essential so-called 'reali.st discourse'. This, in turn, has been assimilated, not as a
negotiation of the dominant discursive codes (which Picture Post dearly was) but as a
mere repetition of the [sic] dominant code, tout court; and this in turn, via a Foucauldcan descant, has been identified, without qualification, with the univocal, scrutinising
'gaze' or the surveillance of the populace by the ruling class. Of course, all regimes of
reprt~sentation arc inscribed in the 'p!ay' between pO\H'r and knowledge, and
Foucault's work is wonderfully insi(rhtful on this score. But the kind of account
outlined above is built on a sliding st~~ies of reductions, of an astonishing- and in the
end unacceptable- kind. There i~ no one system of realist rcprcsentati<~n, ah,·ays and
for eyer fixed in position, from which one type of political practice, one empiricist
reading of history, emanates; any more than there is one deconstructionist m·antgardism, ahvays-for eYer already inscribed in its progrcssin~ modes of seeing. Yesterday's decon:-;tructions are often tomorrow's clichCs. It depends, as always, on the \vay
concrete practices are implemented in concrete historical conditions, the cffectidty
with which certain codes are constituted as 'in dominance', the struggle within the
social relations of representation, at a particular conjuncture, as to whether a tendency
can be articulated towards or away from the politically progressh-c pole. The fact is,
there is no universally transhistorical 'progressive style' and the search for it is itself
deeplv essentialist, even '\vhen constructed under the sign of theoretical antiessen~ialism. 'vVe are always and for ever in the terrain of arriwlation: linkages which
can be reversed, meanings which change their sign from negative to posithe as
they arc repositioned in the field of interdiscursivity in \\·hich ideology constantly
~
~g
260
STUART HALL
intervenes, ·with its reordering, recomposing power. Hegemony is a hard taskmaster,
but it really is different from the idea of the permanent and fixed ascription of an
eternal dominance \Vi thin anv one discourse across the entire face of historv.
Take, for example, the n~w ovcrtypica! and ovcrtypified so-called 'do~umcntary'
shot of the man looking at the sign . .vhich reads: 'Rooms to Let. No Coloured Men'. It
is in the classic documentary, re-creating-thc-livcd-cxpcricnce, style. It constructs the
black man as 'barred' and names the bar as 'discrimination': in the language of the
time, the 'Colour Bar'. This representation cannot be fixed in its Truth by any Real,
since it stops short before the deeper realities of 'Racism'- a phenomenon \Vhich this
\•.:ay of seeing' finds impossible to name or identify. All the same, in its time, this
situation, which was part of the experience black migrants faced everywhere, was also
systematically denied everywhere- unspoken and unspeakable. It required to be, as
one might say, represented - 'documented': if course, within the 'social exposC'
discourses of the period (hO\v else do you represent except discursively?).
But anyone with a proper historical sense, not reading back everything with
hindsight into 'pure' theoretical time (i.e. reading in a historical, not historicist, way),
will know that, in this conjuncture, 'documenting it'- in the sense of putting one's
finger on it, giving it an image, naming it, representing it, bringing it into the sightline
(including that of other blacks who may have expected things to be different) mattered. It registered. It was part of the politics of representation. It disturbed the
'field of vision' of its time. If it had been left unseen, unsaid, the black politics of
resistance of a later period would have had only an empty void to build on. So there is
no point in giving an account or reading of that photograph which suppresses time,
disa\'ows the contradiction. Things which really arc contradictory arc not made more
'revolutionary' by being translated into comforting theoretical simplifications ..
Sartre once said that a 'lazy Marxism' was that which tells us only \.Yhat we already
know. Looking again at some of these early images, [ saw something \Vhich I had not
been aware of before. 'We have already seen how black migration was constructed in
many of the news-photos as a problem. But I had forgotten how pcnistently in these
early days, at the centre of the problem- the problem of the problem, so to speakwas the core issue of sexuality: specifically, sexual relations between different ethnic
or racial groups - or, to giYC it its proper name, the traumatic t:·mtasy of miscegenation. ft is a.s if, at the centre of this whole regime of representation, there was one
unreprcscntablc image, which nevertheless cast a silent shadow across the Yisual field,
driving those who sensed its absent-presence crazy: the image of black sexuality
figured transgressh·ely across the boundaries of race and ethnicity. fn the mirror of the
imaginary- screaming to be spoken- \Ve find figured this 'unspeakable': the traumatic
inscription of black and white people, together, making love- and having children, as
the proof that, against God and Nature, somethinB worked. How often since, in the
syntax of \vhite racism, coiling through the Enoch Powell 'Rivers of Blood' speech, or
in fantasies that dri\·e young bullet-headed fascists or Thatcherite skinheads into an
unspeakable frenzy, ·or in the obscene scrawls that trail their slime across the face of
black people's houses and shops, or carved into the ·walls of public lavatories and on
the sides of apartment blocks, has one 'read', hiding behind what is actually written,
this great unsaid?
The Picture Post of 1954 had a word for it, a way of putting (representing) it:
'VVould you let your daughter marry a Negro?' Typically, it is the 'sympathetic',
IMAGES OF POSTWAR BLACK SETTLEMENT [1984!
261
winsome portrait of a \vhitc mother and a black child which is used to construct this
representation. If \Ve look at the contact sheets from which this particular image was
selected, we find a much wider range of shots, with alternative ways of representing
the white mother and black father: close, not distanced; together, or together with the
child; doing things, in context - shopping, playing, \Valking about. The choice of a
static mother-and-child image as the principal signifier of the white-family-norm¥ introuble is certainly not fortuitous, however fragile or contingent the meaning seems to
be. Indeed, even through its oblique treatment here (\ve are once again in the negotiated discourses of Picture Post) we are reminded that English racism is not so much a
single discourse as the interdiscursive space when several discourses are articulated
together: the discourses of race, and colour, and sexuality, and patriarchy and
'Englishness' itself. 'If she was my kid,' muttered the man in overalls, 'I'd tan the
backside off her.' Against this vh,id, idiomatic, common-sense English 'truth' is counterposed the silent 'appeal', the sentimental eyes- playing straight to the heartstrings:
'Sometimes they say it loud enough for her to hear.'
The pull is irresistibly towards the sense of fairness, the common humanity.
The humanist inflection is central to the liberalism of this whole rhetoric. The more
consciously posed, formally contrasting, white couple/black couple from another
Keystone agency photograph is inflected in the same direction. 'The look of the couple
in front is full of scepticism. He is black- she is white', the caption in Picwre Post reads,
in case \Ve arc in any doubt. 'The other couple - bound to current traditions. Their
world has to be safe, their desires arc security and prosperity.' The t\VO representations have been set up as binary opposites, mirror-images. Then comes the mediation:
'But there is one thing that they have in common: they are equivalent people with their
sorrows and desires - with their hope and anxiety.' Here again, the neatly composed
construction of oppositions, the 'surface' hostility, resolved by a deep, underlying,
essential, oneness. The photograph as Universal Humanism.:\ likely story.
Each period lays its own inflections on the image. Each photograph already has a
context, a set of histories within which alone it signifies. Since the photographs
discussed here were taken - many now more than thirty years ago- black people in
Bdtain have been constructed, and begun to construct themselves, as new kinds of
subjects- visually, in new, different, often more challenging ways. Of course, a 'sense
of historv' is ncYcr confined to the past: it is alwavs a seizure b,- historY of the present,
as Benja:Oin said. But it docs require a delicate e:ca,·ation, an ~rchaco(ogy, a tracing of
the contradictory imprints which previous discourses have stamped, through those old
images, on the iconography of popular memory.